Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Gutierrez:
Why is Discover Similar Subscribers important to MailChimp?
Foreman:
As an email company, MailChimp's reason for existence is to help
people engage with their audience. Whether it's a nonprofit that wants to
engage with their donors, a small business that runs a newsletter, or a larger
business reaching out to previous clients. What we have found working with
groups of various sizes is that almost all of them want to effectively under-
stand how people in their list differ from each other so that they can converse
with them appropriately. They understand that different people respond well
to different kinds of communication. MailChimp considers itself very much
a tech company, so there's an element of self-service to our tools. So it was
important for us to build a tool to help our customers be able to segment
their lists easily and effectively on their own. Discover Similar Subscribers
facilitates that self-service audience research aspect of the application.
At MailChimp, because we have such a large user population and recipient
address population, we really understand readers at a global level. So we can
provide intelligence to our users about their own lists that competitors can-
not. We can do this because we're pulling from a global set of email data that
includes things like fantasy football league lists and quilting-bee newsletters, to
the much larger company newsletter lists. We have the data, and so we can
to find ways to make it available to folks. So the Discover Similar Subscribers
product is one way we bring our understanding of emails to our customers—by
saying, “Based on the criteria you've given us, we think these people on your
list are in this segment and these other people are in this other segment.”
Gutierrez:
Is this a tool that you use internally as well?
Foreman:
Yes. One of the ways we've used this ourselves was when we
released a new product called Mandrill about two years ago. Mandrill is a
transactional email product that is operated through an API. So this would
be something that apps would use to send email. It's very different from
MailChimp. With MailChimp, you log in, you upload your email list, and put
together your content in a drag-and-drop editor. Mandrill is different in that
you hook it into your app. So you can use it to send receipts, password-reset
emails, and similar transactional emails. It's an amazing product.
When we went to announce Mandrill, we used the Discover Similar Subscribers
to mine which of our customers would want to know about our new product.
At the time, we had an email list of about three million email addresses for
our various customers. So the question was, do we let all three million people
know that if they're building an app, they can also use this other product we've
developed? The answer, not surprisingly, is no. After all, my local church, which
sends a regular newsletter, doesn't need to know about Mandrill. They have
no reason to know, and we don't want to bother people. So what we did was
use the Discover Similar Subscribers tool to figure out whom we should email
about the new product.
